Morality for Dummies (1/2) By Kenton Hall

(1/2), (2/2)

I was raised in a God-fearing household. And, by God-fearing, I mean, scared witless. We were brought up to believe that if we behaved, prayed and refrained from any variety of pleasure. (Top three no-no: self-abuse, premarital sex and unripe kiwi fruit). In fact, my father had a terrible habit of jumping out from behind doors and screaming, "Now what would you have done if I had been GOD? Huh? Get off the damn floor and stop crying!"

He is a lovely man, my father. It will be a real shame when I finally snap and gut him like a fish. But, as part of our upbringing, we were instilled with a sense of right and wrong. Mum and Dad were right, everyone else was wrong. As far I am able to recall, it was right to love Jesus, God, the Bible, clean white shirts and sensible hair cuts.

On the other hand, it was wrong to be gay, straight, bisexual, short, young, into any Beatles' records after and including Revolver, in love or Jewish. And that's just according to the handy shortlist they had tattooed on the insides of my eyelids. GK Chesterton once wrote that the problem with atheists was that, once they stopped believing in God, they'd believe in anything.

I can see his point - there was certainly a period immediately following my flight from my parent's viewpoints, belief system and armed guards, where I attempted to conform to some kind of deliberate hedonism. I attempted - unsuccessfully in most cases - to bed anything with a pulse ("Pulse optional" as Eddie Izzard would say), I drank heavily, I learned to make recently paroled truck drivers blush like little girls and I generally tried to make myself out as one weird-ass, bad-ass Oedipal case. I was young, free and in a band. What else was I supposed to do? In the end, I realised that, more than anything else, I had simply made myself an ass.

So, it was time to construct my own moral compass to replace both the nautical precision of my parents' black and white worldview and the wildly skittish, and enormously selfish, Byronic excesses with which I had tainted everyone around me. I also had children, and I was beginning to be aware that they were tutting at me behind my back. They couldn't even talk yet, but they sure as hell could tut.

These days, I have a fairly firm grip on my personal morals. I don't beat, rape or kill anyone. This is rule number one. I don't believe in smacking my kids, and I am desperately trying to teach them not to hit me. I know that, if pressed by circumstance - for instance, if a friend or family member were in danger - I could hurt, maim and kill with little or no damage to my sense of self. I believe - in theory - in peace, love and the exploration of self through art. In practice, I believe that Keane should be garrotted for disservices to music. I also hold to the viewpoints that Elvis Costello and Stephen Fry should be allowed to run the Universe, being forced to watch Big Brother is far more torturous than any combination of bamboo and fingernails and that, if anyone died for our sins, it was Bill Hicks.

Continued...Next Page (2/2)

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